This was a complicated and clever novel that I may not have fully understood. It wasn't quite my cup of tea though I see other's have given it glowing reviews so I may come back to it at some point for a reread. The rare medical condition of Pol was interesting but the obsession with the prophet I found dull.

Had fun reading this book that was quite different from anything I've really read before!

I liked Pol as a main character, and the exploration of his disorder had some especially interesting moments, for example in the way that other characters reacted to his chronic illness. Overall though, the main thing attracting me to this novel was the obsession he has with a 17th century prophet, and unfortunately that aspect of the story did not fully land for me. The book felt like it was trying to cover a lot of different things and I wasn't fully grabbed.

Thanks for letting me read a review copy of this book!

This is a weird shape-shifter of a novel, often veering between absurdity and a comical mundanity, along with non-fiction elements and much more.

It is hard to pin down what this book is at times, but the core premise of the book, and the de-ageing process, sits alongside some very interesting and weird asides, but was very singular in a fascinating way.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I love the idea to this, and was so so keen to read it, but found it quite difficult to actually get through. I felt there was a lot of promise that unfortunately didn't pay off, or at least not how I wanted it to, and sometimes the phrasing of it made me feel quite distant from the text and as if I was reading an essay. But hey, I stayed engaged with it because the concept is just so terrifically strong, and I think if you can come up with ideas like that then you're a good author, even if the way of actually telling said story needs some finetuning.

Pol is bodily in his twilight years but actually still a young man. He suffers from He Hakari Neke syndrome which results in him not aging for a time, then suffering a heterochronous shock which dramatically ages him overnight. He has two episodes – one at about 13 when he becomes biologically 22 overnight – and a second one in his 20s or 30s which transforms him into an incontinent old man. Consequently he is writing his memoir to his young son.
Pol is an academic, studying the life of the 17th prophet Bartholemew Playfere who wrote The End of Nightwork, in which he explained that Armageddon would take place in the islands off the coast of Connemara – the place where his parents honeymooned and subsequently so did Pol and his wife Caroline. He is side-tracked from his work when he is asked to tutor social activist Cynthia. She introduces him to the Kourist Movement which is essentially a struggle between the old and the young – like Pol – young in an old body. Relating to this tension between youth and old age, he wishes to engage with the movement but externally he is the enemy – an old man.
This book felt like it was in the middle stages of development. We are getting there but it just needs tightening up a bit. The voice needs to be a little more consistent throughout, the themes a little more securely linked to each other, the fact that Pol was writing to his son needed more consideration. There is one scene in which he describes his wife’s sexual behaviour that really disturbed me and left me asking, “Why would you possibly tell your son that about his mother?” I felt at times the book was very literary and academic then at others it was appealing to a wider audience. Overall it left me a little underwhelmed but it was good not to have a formulaic piece of writing and there are lots of themes to discuss in a book club.

The End of Nightwork is a truly bizarre piece of work full of wildly ambitious ideas, at least three of which would be enough to fill a novel in their own right.

The narrator, Pol, suffers from He Hakari Neke, a rare disorder which causes him to experience "heterochronous shocks" in which his body ages by years or decades in one go and then stays put at the same age: when he is 13, suddenly wakes up with the body of a 23-year-old man, and he experiences another more severe shock in his 30s which gives him the body of a septuagenarian. The novel is addressed to his son, Jesse, and there is a real tenderness in this writing, particularly in his recognition of the limitations his condition places on his ability to be a father and the strain this places on his wife Caroline.

It is not just family life but also education and employment that are affected by Pol's disorder, which lead him to become something of an autodidact, immersing himself first in the life of the 17th Century prophet Bartholomew Playfere whose writings about environmental apocalypse seem eerily prescient. He subsequently finds himself drawn to the radical Kourist movement which seeks to stir up inter-generational conflict and seek justice for the young who, it argues, are economically and politically oppressed by the old.

He Hakari Neke, Bartholomew Playfere and Kourism are, of course, all fictional but it is testament to the quality and depth of Aidan Cottrell-Boyce's writing that i had to check all three.!They all yield fascinating reflections about what it means to exist in time, and Cottrell-Boyce subverts our expectations with all three too - for instance, I initially found myself in sympathy with many of the aims of the Kourist movement but their methods become increasingly sinister and disturbing. Meanwhile Pol himself elicits a complex reaction from the reader - his condition invites sympathy but his actions and obsessions make it harder for us (and Caroline) to like him at times.

These more serious ideas coexist alongside some gleefully surreal flights of fancy. In one section, mere pages after describing the consequences of a ruptured bowel in painful detail, Pol falls down an internet rabbit-hole by reading "a subreddit for people who don't believe that Keanu Reeves is fifty-one after all." (I haven't checked if this subreddit is real or imagined but once again, the level of detail included felt highly plausible.) In the middle of a fever dream sequence, Pol describes seeing "there on the beach, Nye Bevan twerking" (there are no other references to Bevan anywhere else in the book.)

This is undoubtedly a perplexing read, but it is also much more readable than any synopsis might make it sound. I suspect it will also reward a second reading as there is much that I haven't fully understood yet. It is certainly one of the most original and thought-provoking novels I have read in a long time. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review!

I have to confess I came to this book almost by accident. I was scrolling through NetGalley whilst requesting a couple of other books and the description of this one caught my attention. As I read the blurb, it sounded like a book full of ideas and life. Then I remembered that I had read something by Cottrell-Boyce in a recent edition of Granta magazine and, on checking, I realised that what I had read was the first chapter of this book. That lead, after reading the book, to a happy 15 minutes comparing the two versions and spotting a few minor edits (all for the better, I think).

And the “ideas and life” thing is true. The story of Pol (Polonius) and his family is indeed told in a way that is refreshing to read: well observed, clever dialogue (the girls in this book get some great lines!) and some great descriptive writing. There are also all the ideas about Bartholomew Playfere, the Kourists. The Playfere prophecies lead onto stuff about potential climate change, rising sea levels etc.. The Kourists, when you read about them (I’ll leave that for you to do rather than go into detail) set up an environment in which they and Pol’s condition (explained in the blurb) can bounce ideas around.

There’s a lot going on. But somehow, for me, it never felt like it was going somewhere. There was so much playing with ideas that it never pulled together. Maybe that was the point, but it made for a frustrating reading experience for me because I was enjoying the actual reading of the book but found myself wanting more from the complete thing. But then, this is a debut novel and, as a debut novel, it’s very clever and full of interesting writing and ideas. I’m conflicted because reading the book was an enjoyable experience but I can’t help feeling at the end that the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

But I’d certainly read the next book Cottrell-Boyce puts out. So there’s that.

This is a 3.5 star book for me, but I have to go one way or the other for the rating I assign. I could see myself coming back and changing the rating more than once as I try to settle on how I actually feel about the book.

This is a great story: unusual, weird, gripping and riveting. I was enthralled by the style of writing, the plot and the great characters.
Excellent reading experience, highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

"When speaking with the Augury,’ McCaul wrote, ‘I have the curious sensation that I am speaking to Ebenezer Scrooge. Her childhood and her adulthood are not lifetimes. They are, rather, prophetic episodes, episodes in a sad and sadly limited sequence.’

I remember reading that passage when I was twenty-eight: fifteen years after my first heterochronous shock, six years before my second, three weeks after you were born. But it didn’t make me think of me straight away. It made me think of my father, your grandfather. And then it made me think of you. And then it made me think of me."

Aidan Cottrell-Boyce's The End of Nightwork features on the Guardian/Observer's usually highly prescient 10 best new novelists list for 2023. Son of author Frank Cottrell Boyce, he explained to the Guardian that the novel grew out of the “30,000 words of madness” he sent an agent who saw his short fiction in the avant garde quarterly the White Review and asked what else he was writing after they played football together.

The resulting book is a fascinating read, bursting with ideas, but not (unlike many similar debut novels) so stuffed with them that it overstays its welcome, coming in shy of 300 pages. If there is a flaw, and it's a significant one, it's that while there are common threads among the different elements and ideas, many of which would have supported a novel on their own, the ending of the novel rather peters out with the reader frustrated in their expectation that the story might draw them altogether. That said, rather like a novel that doesn't neatly resolve its storylines (which I typically applaud), this is a novel of ideas that leaves the reader to draw the connections.

As an example, the novel is set around the time of the 2010 election, when having foolishly dumped their best ever leader, Labour lost power to the Coalition, one whose initially impressive liberalism ultimately paved the path to Brexit as well as, crucially for the novel, and via tuition fees (actually recommended by a Labour-created commission) the significant age gradient that has arisen in UK voting intention. In the novel's timeline an even more acute version of this political age divide gives rise to the radical Kourist movement (more below).

The novel is told by Pol (short for Polonius) son of an Anglophilic academic German father and an Irish mother, and essentially addressed (likely as a final will-and-testament) to his young son.

The novel's different, at times disparate, elements include:

- Pol's condition of "He Hakari Nēke syndrome";

This causes the sufferer to barely age at all for periods and then suffer periodic and unpredictable "heterochronous shocks", so that Pol is very small for his age until his early teens and then suddenly undergoes puberty, biologically ageing to a 22 year-old, overnight.

- the apocalyptical writings of the 17th century prophet Bartholomew Playfere;

"In 1646, when he was my age, Bartholomew Playfere was mustered as a musketeer in the Parliamentary forces. In 1650 he had a religious experience which left him sprawling on his back in the back field of the farm that belonged to his father-in-law. The sky turned black. Absolute darkness filled the air, so that he could no longer tell if his eyes were open or closed. In 1653 he published The End of Nightwork and the Sundering of the Curtain in Twayn, in which he described the precise location of the battle of Armageddon as taking place not in the Holy Land but in the islands off the coast of Connemara. As the seas rose, Playfere believed, all of the nations of the world would converge on these islands, would duke it out in an epic battle, the winners of which would be revealed by providence to be the long-lost tribes of Israel, borne on eagles’ wings to a place of greater safety to enjoy the diversions of the walled pleasure gardens of the new Jerusalem, the walls of which would be built against the wall-battering western winds.

‘And those that said to me why art thou come into Towne to make divisions were answered not by mine tongue but by the Lord who promiseth such fire as will cuppell His creation. Since the last Days foretold and forewarn’d of by our Saviour, are at hand, wherein iniquity abounds, and the love of many waxes cold; hence Father against Son, and Son against Father, betraying one another, and hating one another; hence the Judgments of Famine and Pestilence; Nation rising up against Nation. So that the whole World seems to be on Fire before its time and the birds of the air will gather in the darkling sky and will tear out the eyes of the slaves of Sathan.’"

- the Kourist movement (the novel's highlight for me);

"Over the course of the past year, a pseudonymous theorist calling himself Adonis Dolofonithikos has been posting a series of essays on a subreddit. The essays postulate a new kind of historical materialism. All economic and political and social and cultural events, Dolofonithikos writes, are part of an aeon-long struggle between the old and the young. In order to maintain their power in society, the old have pillaged and raped the young, both literally and figuratively. Dolofonithikos calls it the ‘historical overthrow of the youth right’. Eventually, though, this conflict will reach a head. On the subreddit all the people believe that the stage is being set for a final battle, a revolutionary denouement."

It's an odd conspiracy theory that seems to owe more to Pizzagate and Q-Anon and, in the UK, the fantasies of Carl Beech and the ill-fated Operation Midland, than, say, to Climate XR, but with obvious links to Pol's own condition, mentally still young but, by the novel's end, elderly, and labelled by Kourist's as a 'Hoarist'.

- a well-observed drama of family dynamics, the narrator's pithily observant sister Caoimhe a particular highlight;

- a focus on caring, particularly for someone who ages faster than their partner, and the inter-generation burdens of care;

It was interesting, and perhaps a little unfairly detrimental on The End of Nightwork to read this after the powerful Ti amo told by a narrator caring for her husband dying of cancer, which covers this topic much more powerfully.

- The concept of 'Nightwork' itself, which is perhaps the most underdeveloped area;

The title comes from "The End of Nightwork and the Sundering of the Curtain in Twayn", Playfere's most famous work, but there are other references, some implicit (looking after a child overnight) and other's more explicit - an Irish relative who comes over to do nightwork on the Jubilee Line; "nightwork" used rather oddly as putting in effort to keep a family together; and passages like this:

"Ted is saying that they had come out the previous night to watch the parade. Some kind of Kurdish affair. How the streets were littered with flyers and bottles and plastic bags after the parade had passed. And how they got up in the morning pretty early to find the whole place spotless.

‘I do think that nightwork is like magic, isn’t it,’ Ellen is saying. ‘The same quality of experience. Like little magic elves making you think that the whole thing was just a dream.’

‘Nightwork is like set dressing,’ Caroline says. ‘Paying these people to create a stage set for this fricken opera that we call “capitalism” or “civilization” or whatever.’"

Fascinating and recommended and a book I hope to see featuring on awards.

Despite it being published into 5 days into the New Year I have some confidence in predicting that this will be one of the quirkiest, intelligent and idea-filled literary fiction (and definitely debut novels) published in 2023.

Having said that I would not necessarily say that it will be one of the best as I felt that the myriad of adjacent-ish ideas in it failed to completely coalesce by the end in the way that much of the novel seemed to promise.

The first party narrator of the book Pol(onius) was suspected up to the age of thirteen as suffering from delayed development/late onset puberty from He Hakari Neke syndrome whereby he suffered at age 13 a heterochronous shock – undergoing physical development that would normally take place between say 12 and 22 in just a few days. His development then largely stalls at that age but with the threat of a future event in say 15-20 years’ time which would age him by another 30-40 years over a few days – an event which we perceive has already occurred by the time the book is written.

Pol, as well as or perhaps due to his condition, has other quirks – notably an almost lifelong obsession with an apocalyptical Civil War Puritan preacher – Bartholomew Playfere author of the eponymous pamphlet, who convinced of an imminent catastrophic flood lead a group of followers to an island off the West Coast of Ireland (which due to a seeming lack of etymological sophistication he is convinced is the location of the biblical Armageddon).

And while having a reputation among his friends and family as an autodidact, Pol seems something of a drifter in life – never really following through on his research to turn it into something meaningful and working casually as a gardener at a London school where his wife Caroline teaches.

At some point he gets a job as a tutor for the adopted daughter of two friends – a disabled artist and social activist Cynthia who becomes involved in the Kourist movement which has grown on Reditt

"Over the course of the past year, a pseudonymous theorist calling himself Adonis Dolofonithikos has been posting a series of essays on a subreddit. The essays postulate a new kind of historical materialism. All economic and political and social and cultural events, Dolofonithikos writes, are part of an aeon-long struggle between the old and the young. In order to maintain their power in society, the old have pillaged and raped the young, both literally and figuratively. Dolofonithikos calls it the ‘historical overthrow of the youth right’. Eventually, though, this conflict will reach a head. On the subreddit all the people believe that the stage is being set for a final battle, a revolutionary denouement. When the interests of the youth are too much in conflict with the interests of the old, Dolofonithikos writes, then revolution becomes inevitable."

As that movement becomes increasingly militant and opposed to the “Hoarist” establishment (“as in ‘hoary’: like the old-fashioned world for geriatric. They think that it is a clever homonym, plus it also works because Hoarist rhymes with Kourist”) – Pol feels his condition (not least perhaps the sudden age explosion that he suffered) makes him ideally poised to write for and about the Kourists although again he does not really follow through and a second heterochronous shock – after which the book is written – leaves him heading for Playfere’s Irish Ireland (where both Pol and his parents took their honeymoon).

That in itself would be more than enough plot, but on top of this are a string of well sketched generational relationships – between Pol and his estranged father, ageing Mother and carer Sister, between Caroline and her strong willed parents and between Pol/Caroline and their son Jesse (to whom the book is addressed) as well as a lively relationship between Pol and Caroline – family dynamics written in a lively and entertaining style with sharp dialogue which could I think easily suffice for an interesting TV sitcom series.

Pol’s condition of course links to the Kourist/Hoarist conflict and Playfere’s prophecies to the risks of climate change – all interwoven with myriad generational conflicts, …….. but as I implied with my opening remarks the threads don’t form quite the completed tapestry I had hoped for.

Nevertheless, an intriguing debut and one which captures something of the confused times in which we live (the lack of resolution and satisfactory narrative resolution being itself symbolic) while implicitly observing that societal chaos, generational conflict and predictions of imminent catastrophe are far from new.

I think anyone reading it will find themselves both entertained and intrigued, and I very much look forward to what the author does next.

A haunting, mesmerising meditation on mortality and modern life. Haunting, funny and sad, the characters and concepts in this story of a man ageing too fast will stay with you long after the last page.

Interesting novel about a rare aging illness, marriage, age, a 17th century prophet, and conspiracy theorists. It was more modern that I had expected from the description and the cover and there were some great ideas, but I don’t think I got all of it. The first half confused me a bit; the dialogue didn’t always sound logical to me which made it hard to understand the characters’ motives. In the end, this was interesting and sad.
Thank you Granta and Netgalley for the ARC.

Pol has a rare condition which means his body ages in sudden bursts, rather than gradually. At thirteen he aged ten years overnight, and now he is in his thirties but looks a decade younger.

The End of Nightwork takes the form of a memoir written by Pol for his young son, Jesse. Pol describes the difficult marriage between his German father and Irish mother and his obsession with 17th-century apocalyptic prophet Bartholomew Playfere. After Pol discovers Playfere through a lesson at school and a Ladybird book, he learns that his parents honeymooned on the same island in Connemara where Playfere led his people to wait for Armageddon (Playfere had identified it as the location due to a misunderstanding).

Pol and his wife, Caroline, also travel there for their honeymoon before settling to married life. Pol’s medical condition (and frankly, his temperament) mean he doesn’t have a career so his work on Playfere becomes his identity, allowing him to claim status, intellect and purpose to their friends. He works as a tutor to Cynthia, a young disabled artist and activist, and she inspires his increasing fascination with a present-day movement, the Kourists, whose manifesto of intergenerational conflict is refined and discussed on Reddit.

Meanwhile, the everyday conflicts and compromises he and Caroline experience are heightened by his condition and the response of the people around them to a man who is always either older or younger than he appears. Meanwhile, Jesse begins acting out at school and Pol’s mother’s dementia and his own increasingly vivid dreams lead him to re-examine the knotty dynamics of his family.

The End of Nightwork’s apparently discursive style, moving from the mundane to the fantastical with dry humour and piercing observation, masks its clever interweaving of ideas: on how our physical bodies both define and belie who we are, the significance of age in political and social life, the power of cults to mobilise and persuade, how unreliable fragments of memory shape our identity as individuals, families and cultures.

The End of Nightwork is a novel to savour, poignant and quietly devastating. I kept turning it over in my mind after I had finished reading it, and the more I thought about it, the more I saw.
*
I received a copy of The End of Nightwork from the publisher via Netgalley.

There are a lot of fascinating concepts in this novel.
The main character aging differently than most people? A fantasy, parallel history with interesting prophets and mythology?
I just wish there was more of this, and less "dropped", random details that are supposed to help brush a picture of who the characters are, but end up like reference dropping. For example, all the music bands Caroline loves didn't help me understand her as a person. So I wish that what felt expandable in the story had been replaced by more details about mythology, philosophy, and more existential ponderings diving into the main character's condition.
A lot of themes were started and left, at least to me, unresolved, rather than "subtle".
I felt the ending was too abrupt as well.
That said, I did read the book rather quickly and seldom felt bored, so overall it was an enjoyable read with a lot of potential.

I want to thank Granta Publications and NetGalley for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The End of Nightwork is a novel about a man with a rare disorder that causes him to age suddenly and his obsession with a seventeenth-century prophet who predicted the ecological collapse of the world. Pol has a condition which means he stays outwardly the same age until suddenly he can age many years at once. He's in his thirties but appears to be in his early twenties, and lives with his wife and small child in London, where he mostly thinks about Bartholomew Playfere, a prophet Pol is trying to write a book about. When Pol learns about a new youth movement about the tension between the young and the old, he's intrigued, but any stress in his life could cause his condition to trigger.

This is a distinctive novel, combining chronic illness, family, philosophical thought, and what gives people meaning. The story itself, narrated by Pol to his child, focuses on Pol's life and the tensions in his marriage due to his condition and general relation to the world, in terms of thought and action. There's a theme running underneath about Pol's relation to knowledge-making as someone who is trying to write non-fiction without a university degree and who is seen as someone who knows everything whilst being self-taught. There's also a notable generational element to the book, not only in the obvious youth movement, but also relationships between parents and children and the perceptions of Pol when he appears to be different ages to what he really is.

There's a lot to think about with this book, some of which I think went over my head and other of which was interesting. From the cover I definitely expected more of the seventeenth-century prophet stuff, but what you do get from The End of Nightwork is something more modern-focused, thinking about recent history and interpersonal relationships and the ways in which age in important in current society.

Sign the astounding debut claxon- here’s another one! I can’t describe this book- it’s full of ideas that, perhaps shouldn’t work, but absolutely do. Enchanting and at times slightly dizzying, it’s a clever, ambitious work that had me turning the pages, drawn in by a compelling plot and well drawn characters